January 23rd was a cold, rainy Thursday in Atlanta, but the miserable weather couldn't dampen my spirits. I had just finished having lunch with my new business partner, Richard Whitlow, and my Dad. Richard was an old army buddy of my Dad's and now he was our new partner in a joint venture that could very well take our family business to a new level.
My Dad started this business soon after he returned from Vietnam. Armed with a contractor's license and a dream, he rounded up a few of his army buddies who had some construction skills and started building custom houses. Over the years, the business grew and transformed from a one-man show into a mid-sized regional home builder. By the time I graduated college and came to work for him in the mid 90's, it was a multi-million dollar contracting business with both a residential and commercial division.
My dad always believed in working hard and he did his best to instill a strong work ethic in all of us children. I can remember going to work with my Dad when I was really small and by the time I turned fifteen I spent all of my summers working on one of his work crews until the year I finished college.
When I graduated from college, I started working for my Dad full time as an architect and design engineer, but my dad still insisted that I spend at least a few weeks each year actually working on a jobsite. Over the years, I worked my way up the ladder, finally becoming the President of Trident Corporation when my Dad semi-retired a few years ago and I still spend two weeks every year working on jobsites. He kept the title of CEO so that he could still come into the office a few days a week when he needed a break from my mother.
Through the years, my brother and sister have also joined the business and now, my brother Jack is the VP of engineering and my sister Karen is the CFO. We still have a division that develops and builds residential communities, but the bulk of our profits come from our commercial division where we design and build factories and warehouses and multi-use developments with condos and shopping and parking structures.
Now, with this new joint venture, we are going to be able to leverage our construction expertise with Richard Whitlow's real estate knowledge of Florida and the Caribbean. The plans call for building several patio home communities with a total of four thousand homes targeted for retirees on a little over fifteen hundred acres that Richard wants to develop just north of Orlando.
But the part that interested me the most was the opportunity to get involved with Richard in the construction and management of several high-end luxury resorts. These would be built on properties that he had bought when property values dipped following the damage caused by a major hurricane that decimated the Eastern Caribbean about ten years ago.
Richard's real estate company owned properties in the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and a private island in the Bahamas. The problem was that Richard had tied all of his cash up in purchasing the properties and now he didn't have the resources to develop the properties. So, our deal called for us to absorb Richard's business into ours in exchange for some cash and a twenty-five percent ownership stake in the combined business for Richard's daughter, Jackie, who was in the process of taking over for him.
Our first resort would be in the Dominican Republic, which we will manage with the help of Richard's daughter who brings years of real estate and property management experience to the company. If this first resort works out, the plans call for additional resorts on the other properties Richard owns in the Caribbean.
I had known Richard and his family since I was a kid. Richard and his first wife, Helen, were best friends with my parents and we were always hanging out with them. We spent a lot of time with the Whitlows, having cookouts, holiday parties, even vacationing together for a number of years. All of us kids spent a lot of time listening to Richard and my Dad telling stories about their time in Vietnam together.
But my favorite memories of the Whitlow's involved their daughter, Jackie. The same Jackie that I would now be working with on a daily basis. Jackie was a bit of a tomboy growing up and we loved exploring the woods and creeks behind her parent's house. Jackie would even play catch with me when I first started playing football.
Then, before I knew it, tomboy Jackie turned into sexy, teenage Jackie with long shapely legs and these incredible breasts. That's where this new business arrangement becomes a little awkward, because when we became teenagers, Jackie and I learned about sex together, nervously experimenting with each other.
She was the first girl that I ever kissed and the first girl that ever let me touch her pussy. In return, I let her stroke and suck my cock. With all of this experimenting, it didn't take long for us to lose our virginity to each other in the basement of my parent's house.
When Richard and Helen divorced, Helen got custody of Jackie and they moved back to Charleston, where Helen's family lived. Richard moved to Florida with his new girlfriend, and through the years had built a fairly large real estate brokerage, buying and selling properties all over Florida and the Caribbean.
That's how this latest venture came about. Richard was recently diagnosed with cancer and only has about eighteen to twenty-four months to live. After his diagnosis, he reached out to my Dad with this idea he had to merge our two companies.
Like Richard, Jackie was a whiz with real estate, but she knew nothing about constriction. This venture was Richard's grand plan to make sure that he could die knowing that Jackie was positioned for success for many years to come. I couldn't help but wonder how Allison, my wife, would take this if she ever found out about the history that Jackie and I shared.
Richard and my Dad had left to go see another old army buddy of theirs before Richard headed back to Orlando, leaving me to take care of the bill. After paying, I was walking out of the bathroom, thinking about all of those afternoons in the basement when Jackie would bring one of her dad's Penthouse Forum magazines and we would act out the stories that we read when I heard a laugh coming from the bar that I recognized.
It took several seconds for me to find her, but there was no mistaking that laugh. Hell, I'd been married to her for the past twenty-two years. I scanned the entire bar area before I spotted her sitting at the end of the bar, next to a large wooden pillar that partially blocked her from view.
Allison had started her own catering and event planning business about five years ago. She had told me over breakfast that she had a meeting today with Kevin Richardson, a client of hers who was in town from Chicago to work on the plans for a corporate event his company was planning when the Super Bowl came to town in a few weeks. He must be the guy sitting next to her at the bar.
I had never seen her at work and I have to admit that I was more than a little curious to see how she interacted with her clients. So, I walked around the bar and slipped onto the stool on the other side of that big wooden pillar, being careful that she didn't see me.
After listening to her conversation for a few minutes, I was getting a little angry. She was being way too flirtatious for my taste so I pulled my cellphone out and hit record, sliding it around the side of the wooden pillar to make sure that it picked up every word.
We would definitely be talking about this over dinner tonight and this little recording would be my proof if she tried to play it off. I was about to get up and introduce myself to her friend to throw a little cold water on the situation when I heard something that changed the game.
